LOVE - sweet stampin' DT

Good afternoon everyone,

First of all, apologies for the lateness of this post, it managed to slip through the cracks, so wasn't ready to go live this morning!

It's time for our Love challenge this week at Sweet Stampin'. and I made two cards for this challenge.

The first one was inspired by Stephanie Ackerman, and will be hubby's valentine this year...

I used TH tissue paper for the background, and a corresponding stamp on the heart.

The second card is a girlier one, with a Make It Crafty stamp and a Unity stamp sentiment. both of which I'd never used before, which means I can go play at Darnell's NBUS blog anniversary bash! Yay!

That's my cards for today. Don't forget to come and share yours!



Have a great weekend!

Sammy-x

More shabby

Ohhh, look at me... Two posts in one day! And neither of them DT-related... Obviously, I'm procrastinating on something I should be doing... hehe.

So I was browsing Blogland and noticed that The Ribbon Girl's challenge was back up and running, so I decided to play along. As it was an anything goes, I decided to go shabby again.
Now, every single shabby chic card I'd made until now has always been square, but I happened to have a rectangular blank sitting on my desk I'd cut earlier, so decided to use that.

There is a lady in blogland whose work I really admire (ok, there are many, but I'm just going to mention one of them today, lol), and she most definitely inspired this card.
I'm talking of course about the fantabulous Pamellia!

I'm sure you'll know her, or have seen her around Blogland. She is brilliant at many styles, but she most often makes stunning shabby chic creations. She's one of the people I'd like to be when I grow up, and if you haven't yet, I strongly urge you go take a peek at her blog.

Anyways, here's my Pamellia-inspired card for the evening. It doesn't do her justice, but I enjoyed making it nonetheless.

I'm off to go play at The Ribbon Girl now.
And as per instruction I shall also take this to play over at In the Pink! ;-)


Have a great evening!

Sammy-x

CASE-ing my favourite designer.

Howdy everyone,

Don't forget to enter my candy here.

The card I am going to show you all next is one that has been a few days in the making (including, but not limited to, a few false starts and tearing out of hair. There may also have been a scream or two of frustration...).  It came about when I saw the announcement for this fortnight's challenge at As you like it.  Apparently, they thought it was a good idea to challenge us to CASE our favourite designer. GREAT! Easy challenge... Providing your favourite designer is a one-handed donkey with arthritis... in my case... it was a little daunting!
You see, my favourite designer is the very fabulous Becky Hetherington. And those be some very impressive cards to be trying to CASE! Now we're also supposed to say why this designer is our favourite. Well, I'd have thought her cards speak for themselves... But I shall add that besides every single one of her cards being a piece of art, she is also the reason I ended up here! It was through following her cards on Pinterest, I found myself clicking through to her blog and thereby finding the wonderful crafting community here on Blogger!
So there you have it. Reason enough, no? Right next, on to the card...

The first challenge, and believe me, not the easiest! was trying to decide on which card to steal  CASE... Becky predominately works with Magnolia and LOTV, and while they're all lovely, it'll come as no surprise to any of you that I went with the LOTV option. So, in the end I settled on this one, as I think it showcases everything that says "Becky" to me.

Now, there were two big problems with trying to copy her style. First, it was her colouring medium. She uses distress inks/markers, and as y'all know by now, I'm a Promarker girl. Now I did try to use inks. I really did. But I think I shall need both a little more practice and some card that is actually suitable for the medium, because gorgeous as my cardstock is for Promarker colouring, it really doesn't get on with Mr. T. Holtz! The second obstacle was that Becky uses gorgeous machine stitching on her projects. If I *have* to sew, I'll sew by hand, and that's obviously not an option with cards. And I honestly don't even know where our sewing machine is! Probably somewhere at the back of the shed! So, white gel pen faux stitching it was!

Anyways, this was the end result:

I tried to keep the elements as similar as I could without going out and buying tons of new stash (as much as I'd have loved to, my bank manager disagrees!). The image is different, yet still a LOTV fairy (Flower Fairy to be precise). I added stickles to her wings for the sparkle, as I didn't have any Glamour dust. I *did* however have a pot of Shabby Chic Frantage, which I scattered around the image and covered a die-cut butterfly with. I didn't have the exact papers she'd used, but I had one from the same collection (Sofiero collection) , so used that. All the other elements were done in a similar way, by replacing it with as similar as I could find in my stash.
Naturally I distressed all my paper and inked the edges of the image panel too. I love how she then mounted it on another white panel. The brilliant thing about this challenge was that it makes you look really closely at a card, and you notice so many little details that add so very much to a card without you even noticing!
I've made cards in a similar vein to this before, but they were never even remotely in the same league as Becky's, which I can now put down to the fact that she puts so very much into each one, and all those details really do pay off!

And of course, the obligatory decorating of the inside!

I'm quite pleased with my card, though not entirely happy with my flowers... That's something I still find a bit hit-or-miss. People like Becky make that look so easy! lol.

Anyways... I feel I ought to apologise for the super-sized essay on this card, lol. There was actually so much more I was going to say, but I'm thinking if you stuck with me this far that is probably about as much as I can ask from anyone!

I hope you all have a fantastic day/eve, and I will see you all in the morning with my CraftyHands DT post!

Sammy-x